LUCI enables Lenovo’s business units to get customer and business insights

Bangalore: With enterprises and companies giving significant focus to customer-data in a bid to drive business and improve customer experience, the role of technologies like business intelligence (BI) and analytics has become very crucial.

In fact, Chinese technology giant Lenovo has been a step ahead in not only just leveraging BI and analytics technology, but internally has built multiple enterprise data warehouse platforms in recent years.

Among such is LUCI, which stands for Lenovo Unified Customer Intelligence, a self-service scalable platform that delivers real-time analytics. It, thus, provides meaningful insights across the business, including customers’ touch points and their entire journey.

“LUCI is an internal enterprise data warehouse platform that leverages some internal on premise servers as well as externally on the AWS cloud. Depending on what kind of data we want to use, either the internal or external database is used through our LUCI platform,” said Santhosh Nair, Head - Analytics, BI & Visualization, Lenovo India.

“For example, if we want to do BI or analytics on some confidential data, then we put it on our on -premise internal servers and if the data is more of a generic nature than it is put on AWS cloud but both are secured,” added Nair.

Company’s different business units have been using this platform globally and it’s been supported by Nair’s team based in Bangalore. The platform was rebranded internally some 3-4 years ago as LUCI.

The LUCI perform runs on Lenovo Server solution. These servers run Spark and other real-time analytics tools. LUCI is empowering Lenovo’s in-house natural language processing (NLP) engine for text analytics and also hosts of other tools like Tableau, Adobe, R and other machine learning algorithms, etc.

There are multiple other such platforms that Lenovo has been using internally for different data and analytics requirements. Today, some 20-30 business units of Lenovo Group are leveraging the LUCI platform to drive analytics and BI for their data operations and building different data models.

Expanding LUCI’s capabilities

For instance, during any business meeting, if any, data related query is raised then probably it would not be addressed immediately but may take a day or longer time to respond to it. “In order to provide solutions to this kind of problems, we have integrated Amazon’s Alexa with our LUCI platform, and so the queries are answered in real-time orally,” informed Nair.

This has been made possible due to LUCI‘s capabilities in terms of data integration, analytics and provide actionable insights in a matter of seconds. Hence forth, decision making process has become much faster with a better business impact.

“However, it’s not necessary the LUCI platform can be integrated with only Amazon Alexa because it can work any voice assistant devices,” commented Nair.

According to Nair, the advance use of BI and analytics over IoT and voice assistant devices depends on the maturity level of the organisation and convenience of people. He pointed out that some people may not like to ask too many questions to the voice assistant or probably if they are travelling, then they would not like to listen to the voice based query result but would want it over an email.

“So internally, we are trying to integrate the voice based query results with emails, so people can ask queries orally on the fly through their mobile phones but will their queries’ answered over emails,” explained Nair.

However, Nair emphasized that it depends on the maturity level of the organisation and how people actually wants to their queries to get answered.

Looking at the overall industry, lot of companies including Lenovo is coming up with voice based devices like Amazon Alexa and Echo. In fact, Adobe recently launched new voice analytics capabilities in Adobe Analytics Cloud that helps companies to offer more personalised customer experiences through voice-based interfaces.

Now days, people are using voice commands to buy products rather than going through the websites or retail stores as lot of products data and information is getting pre-integrated with users account. Parallelly, companies in the US and Europe are also trying to come up a measurement system to find out how many of their products were sold or ordered using voice based assistants.

“Even internally we are also trying to adopt this voice based BI and analytics mechanism; however it all depends on the convenience of people and how they respond to it,” commented Nair.

However, this does require some amount of back-end work trying to train or enable the data according to the language or dialect because it varies from one country to another and then the data would able to pick the voice commands. Otherwise it won’t work.

“Although technologies are evolving fast and even comes with different language support, but certainly the training and testing is required before such products or services are launched in the market,” concluded Nair.